One for The Road – THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES Teaser

I don’t believe in “hate-watching”, but if there’s any franchise I’m consuming despite my better judgement, it’s The Hobbit.

I have a strange relationship with Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth films.

While I excitedly approached and soaked up THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING and THE TWO TOWERS, I came away from THE RETURN OF THE KING a little cold (I blame the seventeen endings). What’s more, I found myself rolling my eyes at that year’s Oscar love-in for the film I’d found the weakest…a love-in that seemed to be as much about the trilogy as a whole, and not that one specific film.

Fast-forward to Peter Jackson returning to the series with a new trilogy of films: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this feels like overkill.

There’s been very little in this new trilogy that has matched the joy that the first trilogy brought me. Hell, the second film left so little impression on me that I didn’t even review it.

So now here we are about to go back to Middle Earth one more time (final time?). I’m going to see it, and as always I will hope for the best. But just in case I don’t review that film either and this is my last chance to discuss Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy, let me just go on record as saying that I wish the project had died on the vine when Guillermo del Toro walked away…and that Peter Jackson could have spent these last several years working on other ideas. Ideas more original, and dare I suggest, more exciting.